Introduction

Raffaella Barker (2014) contemplated what to call her father's former wife – if not stepmother, then what? A similar dilemma was experienced by Sanner (2023), who noted that her father's son, her half-brother, calls her biological mother his stepmother. Gill, one of the stepmothers I interviewed, said: ‘Yeah, yeah. My stepdaughter-in-law or whatever she is. … My cousin looks after her ex-husband's little girl, who's obviously no relation to her but related to her sons so, you know, her sons, two sons, stepsister, no half-sister, sorry.’ What all these stories have in common is that people have complex stepfamilial relationships for which there is no adequate terminology, at least not in English, which renders these relationships invisible or confused with other step/familial designations. And, perhaps more importantly, these stories tell us that naming steprelationships in ways that show their character and also distances them from the wicked stigma is important for stepfamily members – and not necessarily a sign of lack of institutionalization (Allan et al, 2013; Cherlin, 2020). This historical reality has obscured stepfamily members in historical records with the added confusion of various naming traditions in different European countries, denoting distinct conceptualizations and practices of doing and displaying stepfamilies. But the hegemony of the English-speaking countries in research on stepfamilies means that histories, naming, legal practices and experiences from ‘other’ countries are invisibilized. To illustrate this point, one just has to look at The International Handbook of Stepfamilies (Pryor, 2008), which is international insofar as out of 23 chapters, it has three chapters on stepfamilies not in the English-speaking world, that is, Japan, France and Mexico.